I've had pretty good luck with Star Commander on a 200 MHz Pendium.
Instead of making up a cable, I just nibbled the a appropriate hole in the
back of my 1571 and installed a female DB-25 connector with all of the
applicable parts on it. I use a straight male-male DB25 to hook the 1571
to the parallel port.
FWIW, I used some generic junkbox Schottky diodes that I had kicking
around--they worked fine.
Cheers,
Chuck